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Transcript 291B — On Friendship and Making Friends
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Brother Camping, my daughter goes to a Christian school, which we're very proud of, to be able to send her. But she has trouble making friends. She tries to make friends with different girls, and it seems like the girls just pair off, or in groups of three's. And they don't seem like they want to make friends as she would like. And she feels left out. And she just was wondering, what could she do? Do you have any scriptures?
HC: I would say, first of all, that God does not guarantee that we will have friends. Jesus of course is our example, and He was despised and rejected of men. Jesus suffered as He carried out His work of bringing the Gospel, and the Bible indicates that we also suffer.
I would make this practical suggestion. Sometimes we are waiting for someone else to befriend us, or do something for us. We have a little self-pity, or we feel we're entitled to something, and we're waiting for it to happen to us. My suggestion is that you tell your daughter, and encourage your daughter, and guide your daughter, for her to be a friend to these other girls, without particularly worrying about whether they will be a friend to her. If she will try to do little acts of kindness for them, without expecting anything in return, this is true love, you see. And when they do not react in a friendly way in return, that's their problem before the Lord.
We read in Romans 12:18: "If possible" . . . [now this can be carried to even very extreme cases; your case is not at all extreme, but the principle still holds] . . . "If possible, so far as it depends upon you, live peaceably with all." Now let's say you have an enemy. Now you want to live at peace with that person. And so you do everything to live at peace with that person. But he may not want to live at peace with you. He wants to be your enemy. And so that's his problem before the Lord, but you know that insofar as you are able, you try to he at peace with him.
Now it's the same with your daughter and these girls. Insofar as she is able, she should prove to be a friend to them. Think kind thoughts of them. Now this is one area where we can lose friendships very quickly. If she says or even thinks nasty things, bad things, about these other girls, we can telegraph this. In other words, there can be an air of, our manners will begin to show this. And the Bible says in Philippians 4:8, "Whatsoever things are noble and are loving and of good report, think on these things."
And so encourage your daughter to think noble thoughts about a friend, or those that she associates with. Suggest to her that she try to be a friend to them, without expecting their friendship in return. You see, Christ, when He came, showed His love to the multitudes, didn't He, as He healed them and fed them, and so on? And yet they didn't react in a reciprocal way. They ended up crucifying Him. And that's the nature of life, very frequently.
CALLER: If they start talking about another girl or boy at the school, she won't have anything to do with that part because she doesn't like talking about other people. She knows it isn't right.
HC: And so at that point, first of all, she wants to make sure, when she walks out on the conversation, that she doesn't do it making a big show of it. Or she could try to direct the conversation.
CALLER: She tried this. She thought that this was maybe why they don't want to be her friend.
HC: I see. Then she'll have to patiently endure it. And it might be that she could just gently excuse herself, without being ostentatious about it, or really obvious about it. The Christian life can be a very lonely life. It really can be a lonely life.
CALLER: She loves the Lord too much to give up what she has in the Lord.
HC: Yes. And she must never compromise her spiritual convictions in order to have friends. That is going down the wrong path.
Sometimes we parents worry about our children when they have hard going, when they face this kind of a situation or a much worse situation. But we must remember that childhood is a training ground for life. And whatever she is experiencing as a youngster, it is going to be duplicated more severely perhaps when she is older. And now she can experience this while she is under the encouragement and the guidance of parents who love her dearly. Later on she may have to face it alone. And so it is excellent training.
CALLER: Well, I appreciate your talking with me, and I hope it will help her.
HC: Thank you for calling.
Let me just make one other comment to the young lady who was having difficulty finding friends at school. You know, there is this one problem that sometimes arises. We look at our classmates, and we see these two girls paired together, and those three having an animated conversation together. And everybody seems to have their friend, and we feel left out.
But look around. Look around. You know, God wants us to be friends with those who need a friend. And you're going to find that there are others in school who are very lonely, for maybe other reasons. Maybe they don't dress as well, or maybe they're of a slightly different skin color, or maybe they are very quiet, like yourself. Now you look for an opportunity to be of service to these. Look for the underdog, in other words, the one who just seems to be having the poorest time of it all. And that is the one that you really want to befriend. That is the one who needs you. And you're going to find that before long there's someone who is going to become your friend, and it's going to be a friendship that is really worth something.
Now even if it didn't happen that this person became your friend, you would have at least known that you have been available to do the Lord's will.